Jungle Se7ens - Instagram story

As part of the deliverables I needed to provide social media content and the main one being Instagram. I was aware of the posting size, but when it came to the animations and videos for the grid and story I was unsure of the max/min lengths, sizes etc. I did some research online to find this information out:

https://blog.snappa.com/instagram-story-dimensions/


1080px by 1920px

Long and Redundant Stories

For Instagram stories, you are limited to 15 seconds per individual story. But… you can post however many stories you want. The key is to avoid the swipe away! The swipe away is a follower skipping your entire story and you want to minimise this by keeping your stories short and concise. Just like Snapchat, the last thing you want to do is watch a short film from someone else’s story. The stories are limited to 15 seconds for a reason, so consider that when posting your content.

Too Much Promotion

Just like any form of social media, avoid too much promotion of your business or brand . If you’ve ever watched Gary Vaynerchuk, you would know that he is all about the jab, jab, right hook. This generally means providing value before hitting your followers with a promotion or call-to-action to do something for you.

Excessive Text

Remember… you’re limited to 15 seconds per Instagram story… It’s quite the amount of time, but not enough time to read a J.K. Rowling trilogy, so keep it short! The last thing anyone wants to see is a wall of text on their social timelines, so once again be concise in your wording and make sure your content is attention grabbing and brings some sort of value to the audience.

Irrelevant Hashtags with Instagram Stories

What is a neat feature with Instagram Stories is the ability for you to use hashtags that will help users across the platform discover your content. What you want to avoid is using too many hashtags since this would look very spammy on your story, but you also want to avoid using irrelevant hashtags. Add a few in where it makes sense and make sure it creates some type of value for discovery. We’ve written a full guide on using hashtags for Instagram, many of these principles apply to Instagram Stories.